'Big Bang' machine restarts after two-year shutdown

University of Alberta physicist Roger Moore stands at the Large Hadron Collider at Europe's physics research centre, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. SUPPLIED PHOTO/University of Alberta

Latest News

Trevor Robb, QMI Agency

Apr 6, 2015

, Last Updated: 7:53 PM ET

EDMONTON -- It's been a long wait for University of Alberta physicist Roger Moore -- two years to be exact.

In 2013, scientists at Europe's physics research centre, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), were forced to shut down operations of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be upgraded for higher energy beams.

On Sunday, researchers restarted the "Big Bang" machine, which has since doubled in power, and are back on the hunt for the illusive dark matter -- which makes up a quarter of what the universe is made of.

"Astronomers look out into the universe and what they see is there is a whole lot of matter that is not like normal atoms -- the stuff that you and I and everything around us is made out of -- but it's made of something else that's not atoms, but it has a gravitational field," said Moore.

"If we look at all the particles that we've already found, none of those have the right properties to explain what we see out there in the universe.

"We don't know what it (dark matter) is but we know it was created in the Big Bang, and so by doubling the energy of the accelerator we can sort of wind the clock back a little bit closer to the Big Bang, and if we wind the clock back far enough we can get to the time when this dark matter was actually created in the universe. Then we can see it and understand it, and measure its properties."